Cycles
by SJlikeslists
Summary: They always say that history repeats. They never tell you how to make it stop. 1. Emily 2. Jake
1. Emily

Disclaimer: _Jericho_ is not mine.

She stares down the darkened hallway with their last conversation echoing in her head. She should move or go somewhere or do something other than stand frozen in the face of the repercussions of his words. He always does this. He always turns everything upside down around her ears. She thought that she was finished allowing him to have that sort of power over her, but it has become increasingly clear to her in the weeks since the bombs went off that she was only fooling herself with a temporary reprieve.

"Like you and Jake," he told her before walking out of her life as if he had just been sharing some helpful little piece of information instead of sending her into a spiral. She should know by now that she is always better off when she puts less thought into the things that Jonah says, but she cannot seem to stop herself. He even said it as if it was something that she should be proud of - that she and Jake are somehow a repeat of her parents. How was she supposed to consider that a good thing? Was she supposed to pretend that she did not grow up seeing the way her parents circled each other in some sort of toxic orbit where neither one of them was willing to stay with the other but neither one of them was ever willing to completely walk away? Was she supposed to pretend that she did not remember the yelling or the arguing or the way that her mother used to cry herself to sleep when she thought that her children were long asleep and could not hear?

She cannot get the image of the wedding band still resting on his finger as they tried to stop the bleeding from his arm to stop appearing behind her eyelids every time that she blinks. Has he always worn that? She cannot remember if he had it on the last time that she saw him. It speaks volumes about the state of the relationship that she has (or does not have) with her father that she would not have put it beyond possible that he would have slipped it on to up his chances of her helping him. Only the lack of time that he likely had to make his escape from the compound and hide himself in her house makes her less inclined to think that.

She is a little bit numb and a little bit sad and a little bit angry. (It has been a really rough couple of days.) She wants to be furious for the out and out lie that he told her before he left, but she cannot summon up the energy to feel that way. She is sticking to mostly numb - it requires the least amount of effort on her part. That line he fed her about how he "didn't want to" leave her mother and her and her baby brother is slowly driving her back toward agitation. The saddest part of all is that she honestly thinks that he does not realize that it was a lie. He really thinks that he did not have any other options. There were options. She has always known that in the same way that her loyal, devoted to her children first mother had always known that he could have given up the road he was taking to stay with them but had not. Her mother had never come out and said it, but Emily had seen the far off look in her eyes after he had taken off again after a Christmas or birthday visit that was misty and wondering why it was that the three of them were not worth keeping.

Her mother had gone to her grave never sorry that she had put her children first but still hoping that the time would come when their father would realize and change and decide that they were what he wanted most. She was not her mother. She did not want to be her mother, and she most definitely did not want Jake to be her father. That was a mess that no one would willingly choose, except she was starting to realize that she had.

There had been years of back and forth between her and Jake. They had been the high school couple that broke up and got together again and broke up and argued loudly and made up in public and provided enough drama to keep all of the school gossips in tales. The problem was that they had never really stopped. They had left high school and become young adults who still broke up and got together and broke up again and argued loudly and made up in public and provided enough drama to keep all of the town gossips in tales. There was something off about that, but they had never seemed to be able to break completely out of each other's orbit.

That "sad and depressing" song (as Jake had described it) had been them exactly. They had spent so much time unhappy but had never been able to shake each other or the way things were when they could ignore everything else and just be the two of them together without anything else in focus. Then, he had been gone. The two of them had not really had any sort of closure - not for them. It was their normal cycle just on a bigger scale. Chris had been dead, and she had wanted to blame the world. She had blamed Jake - she had blamed him loudly and vehemently. He had walked away - not just for a few hours or days like their normal fights. He had been really gone. Days had turned to weeks and weeks had turned to months, and somewhere along the way there had been Roger. Her life had moved on around her without her realizing that that was what was happening.

But Roger was gone and Jake had come back, and there were moments when it felt like nothing had changed. It was so easy to let familiar patterns take over. It was so easy to fight with Jake and have sweet moments with Jake by turns. Everything was chaos, but the back and forth with Jake was her normal. She had claimed for a long time that she did not want it to be, but she was no longer so sure about that. She needed to stop thinking. She definitely needed to stop leaning against the wall in her unlit hallway thinking. She needed out of that house with pieces of Roger and her father telling her things that she did not want to hear. Roger was gone. Her father was gone - more gone than even during the times that he had been in prison. It was a strange thought to have, and it gave her an unsettled feeling.

The house was too big and too strange, and she suddenly couldn't breathe in it. She would go to Bailey's. Bailey's was always Bailey's. It was comfortable there. In this moment, there was nothing that she thought she needed more than something comfortable.


	2. Jake

AN: This is Jake in the midst of his I am a chronic screw up reflective thought cycle. You have been warned.

Disclaimer: _Jericho_ is not mine.

If you asked Jake Green to tell you the defining characteristic of his life, then he would blow you off and refuse to answer. Jake was not the sort that had any compulsion to spill the details of his life to the people closest to him - let alone hold those sorts of conversations with strangers. He was not a sharer. He was not a teller. He kept things inside until they exploded, and that explosion would occur in a different direction entirely (one that would never involve actually speaking the things that were wanting to come bubbling up out of him).

If you wanted to really know, then you would have to bide your time and wait for the right sort of a moment. That moment would likely come (if ever) when he had had a few and was feeling a little bit maudlin. Jake Green was a reflective drinker - which was why he did most of his drinking on his own. Even then, he was more likely to think instead of speak. In just the right moment at just the right time, then Jake would tell you that his defining characteristic was the trail of disappointed women that he left in his wake.

It was not something that he had set out to do with his life. It was actually the thing about himself in which he was most disappointed. It bothered him in a way that his avoidance of conflict with his father, his tendency to run when things got to him, and anything else from the litany that the good citizens of his hometown could have rattled off never did. Like most things that got to Jake, he tamped it down. He kept it inside, and he only acknowledged it when he was in one of those quiet, reflective moments when he could not shake the image of the faces of those left in his wake whether his eyes were open or closed. He couldn't see his way out to fix this habit of his, so he chose avoidance instead.

It had started with his mother. If he ever thought about it with clarity and honesty, then he would likely admit that most children got disappointed looks from their mother some of the time. He didn't bother to think about it with clarity though; he was too close to the situation (and too enmeshed in his feelings of failure about it) to view it through anything other than a cloudy lens. He could catalog every disappointed glance that had ever come his direction from his mother. He knew that she loved him. He knew that she saw the best in him and gave him the benefit of the doubt at times that his father did not. He sometimes thought that that just made it worse - to know that she hadn't written him off, to know that she still expected things from him, to know that she thought that he was better than what he often ended up giving. Life might be easier without any expectations. It might be easier to know that you had reached the level where it no longer mattered how disappointing you were because no one ever expected you to be anything other than disappointing.

It was nothing that his mother did. She was just being a mother. There was simply something about knowing that he had let down someone who cherished him so much that inflicted a sense of guilt in him in a way that nothing else could. He never stopped calling her (or at least writing when calling was not an option), but there was something about every communication home that hurt. She wasn't pushy (she knew that never worked with him in a way that his dad had never figured out), but he could always hear the hope in her tone that he would be coming back to her soon. There were times that he just wanted to yell at her that she needed to understand how much better off she was without him always there in her line of vision - the disappointment chronic instead of sporadic. He never said it.

His high school principal had been an intimidating woman that kept order in the hallways with a combination of raised eyebrows and staccato pronunciations of students' names. She had also been his junior high school principal and had looped up with his class of entering freshmen when an opening had occurred. Thus, he had spent six years under her direction. He had been a regular visitor to her office. Sometimes, it was for the usual reasons. Sometimes, it was because she felt the need to call him in for a little chat. He had respected the woman (still did as a matter of fact), and he figured that had been his downfall. It hit you harder when someone you respected was disappointed in you. People whose opinions didn't matter could never cut as deep.

She had known that he was not going to be doing any talking (at least not any relevant talking) during those "chats" in her office, so she had been the one doing the speaking. Sometimes, it was stories that he was supposed to connect to in some way. He gave the woman credit for never bothering to explain what the connection was supposed to be; there was never any pretense between the two of them that he was anything other than fully capable of figuring out what she was saying on his own. Sometimes, she would just look at him and sigh before asking him how long he was going to keep sabotaging himself.

He never answered her. He never wanted to answer her or to think about the question that she had asked him. He went off to school, but he came back to Jericho. He turned ducking the woman into an art form (which in a place the size of Jericho was exactly what that skill was). Every once in a while he would find himself trapped, but she never said a word about the things that were mentioned in that office years before. She never had to; the tilt of her head and questioning eyebrow did more damage than the words ever could.

He could write epic length novels about all of the ways in which he had let down Emily (except he wasn't a writer). It might look like she belonged in a category all of her own, but she was really just another woman left in his wake drowning in the disappointment of all the ways that he hadn't been who she wanted or needed him to be. He and Emily had cycled through together, disappointed, angry, disappointed, passive aggressive sniping, disappointed, loudly broken up, disappointed, back together, and repeat. He did not know how it had started. He only knew that is was and that he always knew where on the cycle that they were but never seemed to be able to keep it from continuing on its course. There was a reason that the two of them had been more or less together since high school and had made it to 27 years of age with their relationship pretty much still the same as it had been in high school. They were always going through the cycle and that never left room for words like engaged or house hunting or joint checking accounts (or any of the other couple sorts of things that he watched the other young adults around him moving through).

Emily never complained about that, never pointed it out, or hinted at things. She seemed content with the way that they were. He should have reveled in that. He should have been happy that there was one woman in his life that he was not letting down every time that he turned around. Yet, there was always something. There was always a reason for her to get mad. There was always a reason for the snide commentary. There was always some reason that they were breaking up again (even when he didn't know what it was). He was somehow always still screwing up, and the fact that Emily just assumed that that was how it was going to be was something about which he avoided thinking at all costs. Then, there was Chris, and he ran.

Running didn't change the problem. It just shifted the parameters. There is a little girl whose name he will never know and whose face he will never forget that is a causality of his particular failing. There were debriefings where he was assured that it was a nonissue. There were words that were meant to reassure and dismiss, but he knows that it will never leave him. It is just a confirmation for him that it does not matter where he goes or what he does. It does not matter how detached he remains or how much distance he keeps between himself and other people. There will still be a trail of women he has let down in his wake - he doesn't even need to have actually met them.

He has nightmares sometimes where the nameless little girl blends together with his memories of Bonnie Richmond. His best friend's little sister had been community property in a lot of ways when she was small. He had poured over those books on signing and practiced in front of the mirror until his fingers had gone numb in those early days. She was (he had told her a couple of times) a way better younger sibling than Eric had ever been. None of that had mattered in the end. He had left her behind without so much as a goodbye. He hadn't even thought about her in his initial frantic running from everything that happened in the aftermath of Chris's death.

The afternoon that it suddenly hit him that it was Bonnie's fifteenth birthday had ended with him locking himself in his quarters. He had drank in the dark and pondered what a sorry excuse for a human being he was that he couldn't even make himself pick up the phone to call Stanley or walk himself somewhere to get a card to send. He figured she wouldn't care to hear from him anyway. Why would she? Bonnie had been driving tractors and the farm truck since she was tall enough to reach the pedals, but he had promised her that he would give her lessons in his "cool car" starting on her fifteenth birthday. He was breaking that promise. There was a solid chance that it had been so long that she didn't even remember but that didn't change the fact that it was another girl he had let down.

He doesn't know where Anna is. The way things are currently looking he may never know what happened to her or the baby. Freddie's baby is always a little girl in his quiet, reflective moments and in his nightmares. They are another set of girls that he has let down. He put them on that bus. He sent them off on their own. He had no way of knowing that the world as he knew it was about to come to an end, but he did know exactly what had happened to Freddie. He knew the type of people with whom his friend had been dealing, and he knew the manner in which they reacted when things did not go their way. He had told Anna he was sending her home. He had told himself that he was sending her home, but he was really just getting her out of the way. He was refusing the responsibility when he should have gone with them. He should have made sure that they got to where they were going without any problems. He should have watched over them until there was someone better around to do the watching. He had failed the both of them.

He doesn't know where they were when things went down. He has wracked his brain trying to think of what route the bus would have taken and how long it would have taken to get where it was going. He has tried to cross reference and think of where they might have ended up, but he doesn't know. There are a thousand variables that he cannot account for because he was not with them. They may never have made it to Anna's family. They may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten caught in one of the fallout zones. They may have died along the road trying to make it or gotten taken by some of the newly unfettered scumbags out there. Anna was resourceful and street savvy, but she was alone. She was alone because he had left her that way.

The walk back to Jericho from New Bern is long and leaves him with too much time for thinking. That time for thinking should be good. He should be making plans for how to handle the danger that is about to come down on his family. He should be thinking of strategy. He should be thinking of defenses. He should be hashing out ideas and settling how best they are going to explain what they must do to everyone waiting for them back at home. He can't make himself focus on any of that. Everyone else seems to be using the time to get their own thoughts together. He desperately needs them to be saying their thoughts out loud so that he can get himself back on track. The only thing in his head is another session of lamenting the women he has let down.

They are trading off carrying Maggie back with them, and he knows that she set herself up for this. He knows that she made her own choices and got herself into trouble. He still can't help but think that he failed her somehow. He should have been more convincing. He should have handled the situation with the fake marines in some other way. He should have found a way for her to stay. He can't be sorry that she was around to provide some assistance when they needed it, but there is a part of him that insists on taking responsibility for her being there in the first place. It places whatever she went through there as well as the injury that is keeping her from walking at his feet. If he had only been more something, then things could have gone differently. They are bringing one unexpected woman back from New Bern with them, but they are leaving the one that they went looking for behind them.

He expected to be able to get help from Heather. He had thought that he would show up and she would be there ready and willing to pitch in in whatever way that she could in the way that he has come to associate with her. She would be there, and they would locate Eric. Then, they would get out of Dodge. He can't for the life of him now think why it was that he had expected things to go that way. Nothing in his life ever seemed to go that simply.

There was no Heather to be found. She was just gone. Eric didn't know for sure what had happened. They couldn't take anything that they had heard from any of the people in charge in that place at face value. There was no way to know what had been the truth and what had not. She could very well be dead. She could just as easily be locked up somewhere waiting for whatever Constantino decided was an appropriate use or punishment or however the clearly no longer stable man would view the situation. He didn't know, and he was willingly walking away without knowing. He was failing her with every step that he took toward Jericho, and the kicker was that he knew he would be failing his mother and Bonnie and Emily and even his high school principal with every moment of delay that would be involved if he stayed back trying to find out where she was. He couldn't escape letting someone down no matter what he did.

Things with Heather had gotten complicated. There was her and there was Emily and there was the general chaos of everything, and he had been in one of those places in his life where he had always run from the difficulty. It was hard to run with circumstances being what they were, so he had ignored instead. Then, she had handled it for him. Heather was a fixer. He knew she would have wanted to help with the windmills no matter what, but he was equally certain that his lack of acknowledgment had contributed to the way that she had gone about it. For once, he hadn't needed to run because she had removed herself from the equation. Now, she might very well be on his list of girls whose lives had ended because of things that he had done.

He needed his patented ability to tamp things down to kick in so that he could do what needed doing. He could sift through his failures later if he made it out of this alive. He had a town to protect. He had an invading army to figure out a way to deflect. He had no doubt in his mind that New Bern was being led by someone who did not care about causalities. Jake would do whatever he could to stop them, but there was a part of him that was petrified that his track record was going to bring down the whole town. He could only pray that his father, Hawkins, and the others would be enough to counterbalance him. He was used to letting down the women in his life, but he hoped that he would be dead in his grave before he had to live with the knowledge of having failed the women of the entire town.


End file.
